Trans Auntologies

What is it about?

This article reads Beauvoir's Second Sex from the perspective of trans masculinity, using gender dysphoria as a critical approach to explore the complex history connecting Beauvoir to French materialist feminism and trans masculinity. For the author of The Second Sex, the emancipation of women is above all a question of ethics, as is her definition of the category of woman as fundamentally alienated. But how does one acknowledge that the category of woman is rooted in oppression without failing to support those who align with it? This chapter follows the threads of an intergenerational history of feminist and queer thinkers seeking to theorize and experience ways out of femininity and the gender binary. But in order to reflect on the contemporary relevance of these emancipatory projects one needs to engage with their inner misogyny. In so doing, I am led to examine the particular position of trans men regarding feminism and the gender binary. The true legacy of The Second Sex, I argue, is a feminist transmasculine ethics.

Featured Image